Posts Tagged ‘inertia’

Over cocktails with Leftists, the most extraordinary thing was said: “You either give to the top or you give to the bottom, and Republicans choose to give to the top.”

This statement was striking in its simplicity. Is that all? It shapes the mind to think about giving, instead of creating, and this shows the difference between Left and Right.

The Left, defined by its only idea, egalitarianism, seeks to redistribute wealth. On the Right, where we recognize the necessity of deciding issues on a case-by-case basis and recognize the particularity of solutions as superior to general theory, the question is not redistribution, but the production of wealth, because we realize that without affirmative acts to produce wealth, it dissipates.

This leads in turn to the realization that the Left does not recognize that civilization requires ongoing and regular acts to maintain. To them, it is there and can be taken for granted, and thus the only question is carving up the wealth that exists to make sure everyone feels included, because this is the way to win at the game of socializing and peer pressure.

They exist in a perpetual present tense where what we have today exists as if by a divine hand, and did not require the work of yesterday to create, and will exist tomorrow without the work of today. In this, we see a disconnect in cause-effect reasoning caused by the proximate intermediary of socializing, which tells that all things exist by human intention alone.

In other words, humans intend for no one to go hungry, so they write a check from the Treasury and the problem goes away. Or they intend for all people to be equal, so they proclaim it and execute dissidents on the guillotine. Maybe they want everyone to be accepted, so they force acceptance of all people, no matter how much they deviate from social norms.

What they forget is that civilization as we know it comes from the affirmative acts of our people. It takes work to make food, shelter, and an economy. Social norms keep people moving in the same direction, and enable civilization to function in the first place. Inequality drives people to rise above others and therefore, to put the competent at the top of our hierarchy.

Leftists do not recognize these needs, and as a result, are entirely blind to the task of maintaining civilization. This means that to them, the questions of leadership are as simple as how to spread money and power around. Conservatives aim to create that wealth and power, and to them, division of it is done so that more is produced.

This is why conservatives emphasize giving money and power to the competent. It is not a question of making everyone feel accepted, but ensuring that the people who are most likely to make more wealth and power are in a position to do so. This is entirely lost on the Left, who do not exist outside of a perpetual present tense where these things already exist.

Inertia drives the Left. Finding themselves in a civilization where benefits are present, they assume these are perpetual and given by heaven. This inertia may reflect a fear of the passage of time, including aging and mortality. It manifests in a denial of the cyclic nature of reality and our part in it.

It also provides a rationalization and decline and justification for profiting from it. If civilization “just exists,” without requiring us to be means to the end of its perpetuation, there is nothing wrong with taking everything that one can and giving nothing back. One is freed from the guilt of watching another labor for shared benefit while taking for personal benefit only.

This inertia and rationalization provides the individual with the ability to act selfishly without guilt, while simultaneously not worrying about the future. In this view, what existed at the birth of the individual will exist in perpetuity regardless of the actions of the individual. They view themselves as having no effect and no obligations.

From this comes the “bourgeois” mentality or the view of the successful middle class, which is that society is a competition for resources and the only political involvement required is to “virtue signal” or demonstrate moral goodness through transferring wealth to those with less success. Politics is a means of symbolic gestures that lead to personal success.

When we view Leftism through this filter, its origins as an adaptive pathology become clear. It seems to be an ideology, but really, it is a defensive rationalization for the individual to disclaim obligation to maintain civilization. This explains its enduring popularity as well as its incoherence.

Once it is visualized this way, Leftism becomes defeatable. It is no longer an active philosophy that has actual goals. Instead, it is a pathology of people seeking to accept and deny the decline. They perceive it as a way of making themselves more important in a shrinking pond. If this power is removed, Leftism becomes inert and thus unrewarding, and will be discarded.

Recapping history in brief: The EnlightenmentTM legitimized egalitarianism — lack of social standards to hold back the individual — as a viewpoint, then the French Revolution in 1789 made it a political force. The French went on from there to rage across Europe in the first of the ideological wars, and the Americans tried to invent a form of liberalism that would not consume itself.

We all know the problem of liberalism: it destroys civilizations and leaves third world remnants. It does this by dividing the people against one another and substituting the quest for civilizational and personal health with an ideological jihad for ever-greater equality. Its policies are unrealistic, its advocates insane, and it constitutes a power grab that then fails to rule because it is mob rule.

Why, you may ask, with every intellectual who was not awash in personal problems knowing this since 1500 AD approximately, has nothing been done?

The first is democracy itself. Crowds reward emotionally-pleasing ideas that are easy to understand, which cuts out any long-term plans (longer than the next year at most) and any complex ideas that cannot be explained in one sentence at a bar. Crowds also like to receive things from society, and to not be accountable, so radical changes are bad but entitlements are good.

The further problem is the compromise problem which is that in a group of people, each person will differentiate himself by having a unique opinion or need; the process of differentiation is important for that person to succeed socially. This will force a norming onto the many divergent ideas which involves taking their lowest common denominator. (See LCD, r/k, Dunning-Kruger.)

Between these effects, you have a political system that is hostile toward leadership. Leadership sees what others do not, acts toward it, and worries later about getting all the special interests into line. Politics works the exact opposite way: it is “pragmatic,” and involves currying favor among special interests and flattering voters and accepting lobbyists and the interests of foreign powers, a process that politicians hide behind altruism because if you can justify your plan with helping pity objects — the poor, women, LGTBBQ, minorities, orphans and cripples — then the credulous wide-eyed voters will go for it and completely fail to observe its actual goal.

This is analogous to advertising. If you want to make good beer, you create a painstakingly crafted product that is more expensive than the average and has low margins. If you want to make money making beer, find a way to do it at low cost so that you can both sell it cheaply and have a high margin. This requires making bad beer, but you can offset that with a relatively minor cost — compared to that of making actually good beer — of advertising. When you advertise, do not sell them cheap beer. Sell them an image of how this is sexually successful person beer, and being essentially monkeys with the facility of language, they will buzz warmly to that image and buy the product. Politics is no different.

In addition to the problem of politics, there is the problem of internal politics on the right:

On the other hand, it has happened several times already in the history of the Right that intellectual movements have gotten to this level. Then they dissipated. For whatever ultimate cause, they became corrupted and oversimplified; they lost the enthusiasm of their followers and the attention of everyone else. These schools of thought all failed to impede the advance of liberalism. Between its initial awakening and world historical influence there seems to be a Filter (perhaps several, but let’s keep things simple), and no antiliberal movement has yet survived it. And this challenge is before the neoreactionaries, not behind them. – Bonald via Outside In

What, indeed, is this Great Filter?

I submit it is two things: First, people interested in normal life do not have a concentrated demand that is deconstructive like the ideological people do. Second, people on the right are easily seduced by the ego, which demands social success over accuracy, and so they modify their philosophies to include what people want to hear and special interests demand, and get rich and popular and so everyone follows them.

Truth is a lonely path that can only be appreciated by at best the top fifth of the population in terms of intelligence. Then the question of their honesty arises. Have they disciplined their emotions? Are they mature enough to view a world in which they and their personal success are not the most important things? Can they think on a long term basis? And the biggest: can they think of situations with more than one actor, such as market forces, culture and leadership working together, instead of the standard modern solution of making a law to create an institution to address a problem with a strict rule?

Most right-wingers know they are not-liberal by their gut feelings and their intimation that liberalism is sheerly insane.

There are some who are not right-wing per se, but also recognize that the liberal/leftist plans will end in disaster.

These two find it very hard to unify in any way because to do so requires unpopular thoughts, violation of trends and fashion, and even more, personal sacrifice by not profiting from selling people what they already want to hear, and personal negation by recognizing the world outside of the narcissistic ego.

Any right-wing movement is easy to split up. Wait for it to get going, then re-state liberalism with a conservative surface. The crowd will flock to you! You have given them a path of least resistance, and the ability to be popular for upholding it. This is why conservatives always try to be like liberals, even though it hands them defeats over the long term.

It is easier for conservatives to be the “party of NO” because it enables them to hide their own ideas and focus solely on why liberal ideas are insane, dysfunctional and destructive. While this is less popular than the “and it’s all free!” style of politics, it gains support from those who want lower taxes and to avoid following the ideological train into the graveyard of empires along with the Soviets.

When in a crowd, the individual takes credit for anything good that comes of the crowd action, but if something goes wrong, there are always the others in the group to blame.

It is a perfect perversion of civilization into parasitism. Take the benefits, externalize the weaknesses.

Crowds have great inertia for this reason. They sponsor rent-seeking behavior where people see that something profitable is happening, so they join the crowd for the good parts. But the costs? Those they pass on to others.

We can see this phenomenon in all human activities: business, government, religion and socializing. When people are in a group, they feel that membership entitles them to the good but when something goes wrong, they push the problem off their desks and go on their merry ways.

As the West spirals down to internal collapse, the nature of the crowd stands revealed. By removing accountability, it detaches people from reality. They then go further into themselves and mentally associate with only the positives — what they desire, easily understand and feel — and ignore everything else.

This creates a mental state known as solipsism. In this state the individual believes that the world exists within himself. He knows only what he wants it to do, and excludes the idea of consequences outside of that intent. Good intentions become reality to such a person.

As a side effect, crowds create great inertia. When a good thing appears, many people show up to take their part of the benefits. When its errors become visible, they deny them, because in their solipsism they want only the desired and wish the bad away. When it finally cracks, the group scatters and the blame game begins. But at that point, everything under its control has been ruined.

This phenomenon can be seen in the rise of companies. A good idea comes forth; just about everyone wants to be hired by this company. To it they bring their own wants and a lack of care about what makes it actually succeed. They do not care about its future; they only want to take what is there now. With many contradictory directions, the company becomes enmired in trying to ensure compromise. Its business changes from whatever earns it money to managing itself internally.

The modern West finds itself in this situation, as it has been since it legitimized Crowds as the rule of law in 1789 with the French Revolution. Centuries later, the inertia is finaly slowing. As Slavoj Zizek recently argued in a revealing interview for those who read between the lines:

We have a right to set limits. We feel too guilty in Europe — our multicultural tolerance is the effluent of a bad conscience, of a guilt complex that could cause Europe to perish. The greatest threat to Europe is its inertia, its retreat into a culture of apathy and general relativism. I am dogmatic in that sense. Freedom cannot be sustained without a certain amount of dogmatism. I don’t want to cast doubt on everything or question everything. Liberal dogmatism is based on what Hegel called moral substance. That’s why I am also against every form of political correctness, which attempts to control something that should be a part of our moral substance with societal or legal bans.

Inertia is what comes of personal freedom without limits. With democracy, we become a Crowd, and then we become solipsistic. At that point, no one wants to either rock the boat or pay attention to reality at all.

Zizek contrasts “social freedom” to this, which seems to mean the ability of societies to make choices. With democracy, we go in only one direction, which is more personal freedom. That turns our societies into moribund entities in the business of compromise, but no longer in the business of thriving.